Nation of One

Oh, Canada – you betcha

So I am here in Oh, Canada and I think I made a mistake. See last night I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what coat I should wear here. I checked the weather for the next few days here in Calgary, Alberta home of the 1988 Winter Olympics when, we all remember, Alberta Tomba of italy won two gold medals in Alpine skiing. Of course the fact that Alberta hosted a winter olympic should have resolved my quandary. Also the fact that it’s February anywhere. So the Internet said that it’s going to be like in the 40s during the day while I’m here. Swell. So I chose the lightweight little North Face jacket that I inherited from Number One Son a few years ago.Looks very fashionable, but not exactly made to keep you warm in the tundra. I have like 10 warmie winter coats at home and there they remain. I would kill for a nice pea coat right about now.

Of course when i checked the temperatures here on the trusted Internet I only looked at the daytime temps, like when the sun is out. What I failed to notice was the night temps which are right now hovering at minus 5 celsius which is how they measure such things here in the People’s Republic of Canuckistan. Fahrenheit is so damned American. Funny I have to remind myself that Canada is actually a foreign country. I think of it as that place on the other side of Niagara Falls. But you get up here and realize that you are no longer in Westminnie. Everyone here talks as if their jaws are wired shut and the road signs are in kilometers whatever the hell that is and tonight when I checked into the hotel where I now sit watching a History Channel biography of Adolph Hitler as I type, the woman behind the counter in response to my question of whether she had a list of local restaurants replied “Oh, you betcha.” I felt like I was in a screen test for Fargo II.

So as you know I had to get up this morning at 3:15 in the am to catch the first of my planes to get here to watch this television. This is an ung*dly hour by anyone’s measure. It is either really early in the morning or really late at night depending on your point of reference. I actually watched the sun rise this morning through an airplane window somewhere over pennsylvania. It was orange and cold. Of course I had two flights today and on both of them the tool in the seat in front of mine chucked the seat back at the first opportunity and lounged in my lap the entire flight. In fact my first flight from still dark Miserable Maryland to Chicago, that toddlin’ town, was a mere hour and a half and yet the douche in the seat in front of me had on a sleepie mask and chucked the seat into my lap before the plane even took off. Really? This is not your bedroom my friend, this is a public function. I’m surprised he didn’t have a stuffed animal and a binkie. Oy. Laying your seat back on an airplane btw is my pet peeve. I love a good pet peeve, don’t you? Gives me something to watch for. I can tell a seat recliner from five aisles away. A sleepie mask is usually a sure sign.

Anyway as you might imagine I am totally burned out tonight and quite anxious to hit the Hilton bed. Btw the beds here have a thing called a “comfort dial” which is located in a really hard to access place down on the side of the mattress. You damn near have to strip the bed to get to it. The thing supposedly will make the bed firm or soft depending on your own preference. You turn a dial, you sleep like a baby. I am a soft guy myself. Tonight when I checked in here I had an hour before I was to meet this work guy for dinner and I immediately reclined on the adjusta-bed and whoever was here before me must have been a corpse because the thing was hard as a slab at the morgue. Didn’t matter. I was so wiped I stretched out for a minute and the next thing I knew I awakened an hour later going, “damn,” and hustled down to the lobby. Oh and I went to this restaurant nearby for din-din – an upscale cool place where hipsters with money obviously eat. Had a lot of glass in it and meals with shiitake mushrooms (yuck). Best part was that part of the restaurant’s schtick was that all the servers were attractive young women in short black dresses and, as my beloved aunt AK would say “the bubs hanging out.” So who was our server? The only guy on the entire wait staff. And he was gay. My life in a nutshell. Any money this guy is a seat flopper. Come, Bruce, lie in my lap, I am all yours.

Love that dirty water

Where do I start? OK I’ll start here – I have to get up at like 3:30  in the morning tomorrow which absolutely sucks. I have to go to Canada tomorrow, eh,  and will be gone five whole days. I don’t even like Canada that much even though they are wild about hockey which I myself am. I’m also travelling with a guy I don’t like that much. What a long strange trip it will be.

So it’s like 8:30 at night as I sit here in the refurbished office at God View so technically I should be in bed right now wearing those cotton pajamas that button up the front like Ricky Ricardo used to wear. And slippers too. But I am not. Soon though, I swear. Really I cannot go to bed too soon because if I do I’ll just lie there like a woman with no estrogen and after awhile my arm, which I place under the pillow (I’m a belly sleeper) will go numb and I will get annoyed with the whole trying to sleep thing.  So I will have to wait anyway until my eye sockets start to burn a little before I hit the Country Squire so I thought I’d share my weekend with you while I wait for the Sandman to arrive.

So the biggest and best thing that La Sooze and I did this weekend was to purchase a steam cleaner for our carpets. Yes, this is the high point of our weekend. Paaaartayeee!   See La Sooze has a problem with allergies and one of the things she read about these allergies is that shampooing your carpets regularly will help. So you have choices here. You can hire a company to do it which means a guy with tattoos and a backwards baseball cap will come to your house and when he’s done you’ll look at your carpets and go “meh, I could’ve done better myself” or you can do better yourself. We chose the latter. So yesterday, Saturday as I peck away at the wireless iMac keyboard, we went to Target and bought a steam cleaner and then we came home and steam cleaned away for ourselves. Very satisfying. What’s funny here is that I had to, of course put the new machine together and then La Sooze was out grocery shopping with her mom, aka Mema while I did this and I decoded what the hell I’d go ahead and steam away and so I vacuumed and steamed and everything smelled really good here at God View. I did notice that the newly cleaned carpets seemed  a tad damp when I was done, but  I attributed this to the sheer wet power of my new Hoover Steam Vac. What I didn’t realize until I went to dump the little plastic tank that’s supposed to hold the dirty water that’s supposed to be sucked up after the carpet is cleaned, is that the tank was empty. Bone-ass dry. Turns out I didn’t close the stupid thing tight enough so the water went out but the water didn’t come back. I didn’t just wet the carpet I fucking submerged it. Oy. Thanks G*d for La Sooze who, after treating me like a special needs rug shampooer, figured the whole thing out and then went back over my meticulous work and sucked up the dirty water for me. To quote the Standells who did the original version of the song: “Well I love that dirty water, oh, God View you’re my home.”  The carpets look fab, btw and I don’t have any tattoos. Praise the Lord for the good sense of La Sooze.

So the steamy part was really only one part of what was a theme weekend for La Sooze and I. This was one of those clean-up and re-arrange the house sort of weekends. We’ve been doing it fairly regularly since the kids all left. I think it’s a combination of we have nothing better to do and with no kids around we actually can do such things. I love it btw. So as I told you recently I purchased a (faux) leather Loveseat for my office here. This was part of the theme weekend too. Changing things up. The Lovey Dovey seat arrived the other day and I anxiously waited for Friday night before I unboxed and put it in place.  I needed time to anticipate. I love anticipation.  Often better than the actual event. Anyway, it looks terrify. A little smaller than I thought (I bought it on the ‘Net so I never really sat the ass on it in advance of purchasing). Picture of me and the seat and the guitar below. Don’t I look comfy-umfy? Anyway by putting the Lovey Dovey seat in place I realized that now it needs friends. One of things I’ve been meaning to do for some time here is to get some pictures framed and hang them in my office here at God View. It’s all part of the ambience – the space, if you will. Anyone who writes or paints or creates in any way knows that the space you’re in is important. Not a game breaker necessarily but important. I mean I could write a poem or a song or a blog in the third stall from the left in the men’s room at work but I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be doing it.  So this weekend La Sooze and I pulled out pictures and things that we will have framed and hung here in The Office to keep the Lovey Dovey seat company. One of the things we’re doing is framing our collective college degrees.  We did my Master’s diploma this weekend and it looks awesome, totally legit like a doctor’s office. I guess doctor’s hang them so you know they’re for real, as if I would go to a doctor and wonder if really they ever did graduate from medical school. Now I am for real. We’ll do the rest of them as we move on. La Sooze’s btw says she graduated with honors “cum laude” says the sheepskin. Mine does not. Beyond that we’ve picked out some meaningful pictures and some we bought frames for an some we’re actually paying to have framed, which takes time. Specifically we’re framing some pics we shot last summer on our trip to Sedona, Arizona and also we’re framing pictures I shot several years ago in the Bronx on the street and surrounding areas where I grew up. I’m hoping that these pictures will make The Office even more inviting as a creative space than it was before. It’s certainly more organized now and the carpet looks and smells great. Inspiring. Maybe I will be so comfy and wildly motivated in here that I will write a book or something.  Or maybe I’ll nap on the Lovey Dovey seat and just dream about writing and never actually do it. That’s more like it.

Which reminds me, I better get to bed – 3:30 comes early, eh? I’ll talk to you later from the People’s Republic of Canuckistan. I hope they have love seats there.

Hey Joe

I want to mention here early on so that you don’t forget that we are a mere 33 days away from one of my favorite Catholic feasts days of the year even though I’m not Catholic anymore. Doesn’t matter. I can celebrate Cinco de Mayo, Bastille Day and Guy Fawkes day if I want to as well. As the bumper stickers on aging Volvo station wagons constantly remind me: Coexist.

So 33 days from today would be March 19. Don’t forget btw that this year is a leap year which means that we add a day in February in order to keep our fab Gregorian calendar in alignment with the earth’s revolutions around the sun, but you knew that. Twenty Nine days in February this year, don’t forget.  And did you know that Julius Caesar originally came up with the idea of leap Year? Hail Caesar,indeed.

Anyway March 19 is St. Joseph’s Day. St. Joe, as you recall, was the hubbie of the Virgin Mother, who I just adore for many reasons, mainly for her pure unquestioning faith. One of a kind, really. Ok an angel, well not any angel but THE angel Gabriel, comes to you and says: Listen, I know you’re not married but you’re going to be pregnant only you’re not going to have sex and the baby that will be born will be the savior of the world and the literal Son of God. And Mary says: what’s called a Fiat, which means in Latin basically “Let it Be.” I assume that’s what the Beatles were talking about in their song, no? “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me.” Fiat. How cool is that? Classy. And her hubby, Joe was just as cool. He had to accept all this. He didn’t say any Fiat but he didn’t say goodbye either.

So I like St. Joe mainly because he’s like the patron saint of dads and even though my own dad was/is a total parental slouch I still admire the ideal of what I perceive a good father would look like, which I’m entitled to do. Joe fits the bill. Also St. Joe is the patron saint of a number of other things like easy deaths (hope I don’t need that one anytime soon), finding employment, and of course, home sales.  In fact you may recall that when La Sooze and I contracted to build God View we did so right in the midst of the total shipwreck of  the economy a few years ago and we were a whisker away from carrying two mortgages and eating our meals at the local shelter when we buried a St. Joseph statue in our front yard and our old house miraculously sold. In fact I have the precise statue right now prominently displayed on the fireplace mantle at God View because  St. Joe deserves specials. Anyway, 33 more days. Mark your calendars. Also to show your respect you’re supposed to wear something red that day. I love a woman in red so that is another reason to like Joe. I personally went out two years ago and bought a red dress shirt for the annual March 19 recognition and I have worn it precisely twice. Like new. I will wear it when? March 19. Oh also in Sicily there’s a tradition that on the feast day of St. Joseph you’re supposed to eat a pastry called a zeppola which looks to me like a donut with a big glop of custard on top. In 33 days I will be the fat guy in the red shirt.

So the Knicks won again tonight. My hero Jeremy Lin only scored 10 but they didn’t need him that much. Even heroes get a little worn out.

Oh and La Sooze and I went to dinner tonight, our post-Valentine Day celebration. We went to a nice Italian place up the street only I didn’t eat Italian, I had a steak. A nice New York strip in honor of Jeremy.  La Sooze had pasta. This is against my number one rule which I have taught my children and anyone else who will listen. The rule is this: when you eat out go with the strength of the place. In other words you don’t order a hamburger at a Chinese place. But Italians eat steak, don’t they? Oh my other iron clad rule for living is this: If you’re going to buy the no-name cheap shit soda at the grocery store never get the Cola, it always sucks. Get grape or orange or something. These are words to live by, I’m tellin’ you.

So of course when La Sooze and I were eating dinner tonight what do you think the dominant  topic of conversation was? No, not that, though I probably did bring it up after the soup and salad plates were cleared. Of course we talked about the kids. Don’t we always? Don’t you always? Mainly we talked about Daughter Shannon who has been sick for weeks with an ear infection and a cold and G*d knows what else. Poor kid. A few weeks ago she went to a new doctor down there in My Hammy and the guy discovered some sort of bump in her throat and everyone freaked and then they ran all sorts of tests and then they said it was nothing and everyone exhaled. Meanwhile while all this was going on Shannon has continued to fight an ear infection and congestion and feeling generally like a load of shit. So today she had a follow-up appointment and was excited because she cannot hear out of one ear and her eyes are swollen and she’s a physical wreck and so she figured the doctor would take one look at her and trip over his stethoscope in an effort to quickly write a prescription for an antibiotic before she made his entire waiting room ill. So she goes in and this tool, this medical moron tells Shannon that, no you don’t have a cold or an infection, you have eczema in your ear. Seriously, he said this. Eczema my ass. He told her to drag her fevered and achy body to a grocery store and buy some over the counter cream and she’ll be fine in the morning. No she won’t. What a fucking imbecile. A mental defective in a lab coat. Shannon had to muscle up to him to get a referral slip to go see a specialist because she wasn’t buying the eczema routine and is desperate to feel better again. Smart girl. She goes back to an ear nose and throat guy on Friday. Today – epic doctor fail. See this is one of those occasions when you wish you were there, when you want to just baby your adult child; put a cool rag on their forehead and make them a nice soft-boiled egg mixed with torn up pieces of bread and a little ginger ale in a plastic cup. My baby. But you can’t, of course. Shannon’s 24 years old and in graduate school. Well maybe you can. I am pretty convinced that if this continues much longer La Sooze or I will wing our way to Miami and either bring our Bubelah home or put on a white starched hat and nurse her back to health in Little Havana. In the meantime we will ask St. Joe to look over her down there. Yeah I know he’s not the patron saint of ear infections but what’s another title thrown in when my daughter’s feeling rotten? If you have a minute Joe, could you stop into the 305 and check-in on the lovely girl with the blonde hair and kind demeanor and the red ears? Appreciate it, my friend. Hey Joe, I owe you.

A Lin-derella love story 

I’m not done with Valentine’s Day yet. For someone who dislikes these kinds of special days (Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.) when you feel like you HAVE to do something, specifically buy something for someone, I am moderately obsessed this year with the big V Day. First of all did you see the comment today that my friend Bill posted? His daughter ‘s boyfriend goes over their house yesterday (Valentine’s Eve) and what does this douche bring with him? Chocolates? Flowers? Diamonds and pearls?  No, he breaks up with the girl. Who does this? I have no idea who this young buck is but I want to give him such a slap today. Really pal, couldn’t wait another day? Valentine’s is supposed to be all roses and smoochie-face, not dump day. This is like waiting until Christmas Eve to announce to your family that you are an agnostic. Game killer. Timing in life, of course, is everything. This tool has zero. I say good riddance to bad rubbish and use the 20 shekels you saved on candy and flowers to buy yourself some class kid. You’re gonna need it.

Also in the spirit of the lovey dovey day I decided late today, like 4:30 in the afternoon late, that La Sooze and I should go out for a nice din din to celebrate our love. Timing, again, is everything. So on my way home in the car tonight I am working the Bluetooth in my ear calling every decent restaurant within a 10 miles radius (our love must be celebrated in a nearby location) and of course every place is reserved up the ying yang. It IS Valentine’s Day after all.  We could have been very European and made a dinner reservation for 9 at night but by then the two of us would have been shoveling peanut M&Ms in our mouths and rifling leftovers in the ‘fridge. Fuhgettaboutit. We decided that we’ll go out tomorrow to a nice place when everyone else is home again eating Lean Cuisines.  Valentine’s plus one. Tonight instead we went to the gym. True love will occasionally sweat.

So listen is anyone else out there getting into Lin-sanity? I am way into it.  In case you are new to this, the New York Knickerbockers of the NBA have a new point guard who recently came out of nowhere and is now like this huge sensation. Kid’s name is Jeremy Lin and he was undrafted in the pros and played college ball at Harvard (Harvard for G*dsakes, that bastion of basketball). As of a week or so ago Lin was the last guy on the bench at the world’s greatest arena, aka Madison Square Garden. No one ever heard of the guy. But in the past 10 days he’s suddenly become the king of New York as he’s been like out of his mind leading the Knicks to six straight wins including dropping 38 the other day on the great Kobe Bryant and tonight he drilled a three-pointer with less than a second to go to win another game. La Sooze and I have fallen madly in love with Lin. Back in the day I was a huge Knicks fan, way back when they had guys like Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere and I then stuck with them all the way through the Patrick Ewing years when the Knicks could never get past Michael Jordan or Reggie Miller or Hakeen Olajuwon. But for the past several years I have virtually ignored the NBA and couldn’t name you one guy on the Knicks. Now I can. Linsane. Lin-sanity. Super Lintendo. I’m loving it. I’m actually sitting around at night looking up Knicks scores again. Haven’t done that in years.  And to top it off this guy Lin is a super nice humble dude who actually talks about G*d but not in that stupid pointing at the sky way. He’s very likeable. Oh and today Floyd Mayweather some jive-ass douche boxer tweeted that the only reason my man J Lin is getting attention is because he’s Asian. I hadn’t noticed. Mayweather would probably break up with his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. Back off J-Lin.

Oh and speaking of basketball I didn’t tell you that last Sunday my team, the girls team I coach, won a terrific pressure-packed game against some coach who thinks he’s Phil Jackson. We came back from 6 down with three minutes left and  my point guard, my own J-Lin, drained a jumper with one second left for the W. We’re 5-3 now and the playoffs start in a little while. I need more Asians.

Finally  I wanted to get back to Valentine’s Day and then I’m done. I noticed today on FaceBook that lots of people were posting love songs, or non-love songs in protest (how do you protest love?) in honor of Valentine’s Day. Got me to thinking about what the greatest love songs are, at least to me. In the spirit of this last night I myself tried to embed a song here in the Nation, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get it On which makes me want to remove my pants the moment I hear the opening notes. But this song is really more about sex than love, although I firmly believe the two can co-exist under the right circumstances. Anyway I Googled on the all-knowing Internet today Greatest Love Songs and was amazed at what garbage I came up with. One website claimed that Sade’s Your Love is King is among the top 20 heart throbbers of all time. Never hoid of it. Another claimed Rupert Holmes’ Pina Colada Song (“if you like Pina Coaldas and getting caught in the rain…” seriously? Top 100 stupidest most annoying songs maybe). Anyway I was going to try to compile my own top 20 swellest pit-a-pat love songs of all time for me but I couldn’t come up with 20. A dear friend of mine, Mary, posted The Doors Love Her Madly today. I thought that was a good one. I would add  maybe At Last by Etta James, We Belong Together by Rickie Lee Jones, certainly Love Reign O’er Me by The Who and the Jackson Five’s I’ll Be There. Also, “our” song, the one that La Sooze and I had played for us at our wedding, was The Beatles In My Life. Truly a classic. But that’s about it.  How about you? Got a fave? In the meantime I will continue to do research and see if I can pull out some lovey tunes I adore but have somehow forgotten.  I wonder what kind of music Jeremy Lin likes? My new love. We belong together.

Let’s get it on

It is Valentine’s Day Eve as I compose here and I am wondering why some holidays get to catch the night before AND the day itself and others do not. Christmas Eve for instance rates very highly on the holiday scale as does New Year’s Eve, which probably usurps its day-later brother New Year’s Day which is mainly a day to watch college football games featuring teams you do not care about. For some reason though Valentine’s Day Eve (VDE) has not gotten any buzz from the holiday crowd. If I were in charge, and I am not, I would have retail stores stay open extra late on VDE and have big sales on flowers and candy and diamonds and other shit we don’t need and I would hustle people into buying these things just because they would think they’re getting a bargain. It would have nothing to do with love or passion, just making money. I think St. Valentine would approve. Btw I did a little research on ol’ St. Vallie. Turns out nobody knows who he really was. There were apparently 14 St. Valentines, so take your pick. He was apparently martyred, though not in Chicago by Al Capone. He is the patron saint of love, (natch), young people (I’m out) and happy marriages (I’m in again). Also, more recently,  he became the patron saint of greeting cards and boxes of chocolate in the shape of a heart. I wonder if he gets residuals?

Anyway, since all of you are so wrapped up in your love for one another today I don’t want to take too much of your time up. I, myself, have my Valentine all lined up in the beloved La Sooze, of course. What’s terrific about my love for La Sooze is that we have an agreement that we don’t have to buy each other any stuff for Valentine’s Day. Whew. Our love is celebrated daily, we figure, so there is no need for setting aside a particular day to espouse it. Every day is Valentine’s Day here at God View. Only without the chocolate. This is good for my midriff and my heart.

Oh speaking of love, and we are, of course, today I finally pulled the trigger today on purchasing my latest obsession. That would be a love seat. A love seat, as you know is a mini-couch that only fits two arses. It’s also called a British two-seater. Apparently the Brits are lovers. Anyway La Sooze and I decided awhile ago that we wanted to add a nice little love seat here in The Office where I type and play guitar and look shit up on Wikipedia. This loveseat, we figured, will pull the room together like the Dude’s rug in the Big Lebowski and will give other people besides Jeter the bothersome  beagle a place to sit. So for about two weeks now I have been researching love seats. I think I know every possible love seat manufactured in the U.S. and several from overseas. I actually found the winner awhile ago but wasn’t ready to pull the trigger yet, thinking I might get wowed by some other lovely couch with a shapely leg. But no, this one was the winner all along. It is brown and leather but in a classy way, not one of those pillowy things you see in someone’s basement with cup holders built into the arms. Anyway, I have never owned a leather couch before. Now I do. Well I will as soon as it’s delivered which should be next week. I’m so excited. I love a good love seat. Happy Valentine’s Day to me and La Sooze. We will smooch on it when it arrives. Office love.

Oh and  I also wanted to mention that tonight when I was walking to my car in the garage at the train station I had an interesting experience. See I always park way up in the garage, fourth floor generally, even if I can get a lower floor. This is a part of my never-ending quest to be left alone. I keep going to higher floors until I see no more people and then I park, and then I take the elevator down. Easy as pie. What’s very cool is that I always park as far away as possible from the entrance to the station so that  when I come back at night I am always the only person on the elevator. Everyone else parks as close as they can which is why Michelle Obama has to spend so much of her precious time fighting obesity for us. Michelle should start a program that recommends parking your limo  far away from wherever it is you’re going and that will make  you  stay slim and svelte because you’ll have to walk a little before the driver sees you. I even have a slogan for her to use: Park far away from the groupa and you will lose your Fupa. She’d score votes for hubby with that.

Anyway today I miscalculated and had to get on the elevator at the train station with another person. And boy was it awkward. What’s funny is that the person was a middle-aged woman wearing a warm fuzzy hat. I, on the other hand, have not shaved in a week or so and have not trimmed my hair since like summer and it now pokes out in weird places on my head, and  today I was wearing a black leather heavy suit coat and a scarf. I looked like a middle aged guy who once wanted to be a rock star and now works in a sandwich shop downtown. Cheese on that? Anyway the woman kept looking at me, turning around and peeking over her shoulder as we approached the elevator. Then when I got on with her I could hear her heart beating. I think she thought she was going to end up a shocking headline on Yahoo news. Then we both got off on the same floor and she was parked directly next to me so I kept having to follow while she broke her neck continually turning around to get the first glimpse of the blunt object I was obviously hiding beneath my jacket. Jeez.  I couldn’t wait to get into my car. After awhile I felt like a criminal the way fuzzy hat kept looking at me. I thought about accosting her just to fulfill her perception.  If only she knew that I am a lover and not a fighter, a real St. Valentine’s Day kind of guy. Truth is I would be more apt to hold the door open for her and lend her a 5 than to pull her purse off her arm. If I’d had a greeting card I would have given it to her. Be my Valentine fuzzy hat? She would have maced me.

Anyway since it IS Valentine’s Day I am including the following video for you to listen to. I want you to crank it up and think of the person you adore and you will be sanctified. I played this tonight here in the office – turned it up to uncomfortably loud levels and thought about that first moment lo’ these many years ago when I realized that without La Sooze beside me I ached. I love that feeling. Some things never change. So Happy Valentine’s Day one and all. Feel the love. And baby,  let’s get it on.

When the music’s over, turn out the lights

It’s Sunday night and you know what I will not be doing tonight? Watching the Grammys.

Really.

Truth be told I can’t say that I’ve really watched the Grammy awards before anyway, just like I have never really watched the Academy Awards or the Tony’s or Emmys or even the ESPYs for that matter. Not a big award show fan myself. Have a hard time watching some industry get all excited about itself and expect me to watch them do it. Now if there was a Bloggies I would watch, especially if the Nation was up for a prestigious award in the category – white guy wise asses with nothing better to do. I’d be glued.

The Grammys, specifically, are super annoying and get more so every year which is a good reason to find something else on television. I think a lot of my distaste for it has to do with the fact that I’m getting older and the kind of music I listen to is not exactly what they’re celebrating on the Grammy extravaganza. Not that I’m sitting around in a pair of Earth Shoes listening to Grand Funk Railroad. No. I listen to some old stuff but I also listen to an alternative radio station out of a local college that plays a whole lot of bands I’ve never heard of and I’ve discovered some great stuff on there (Alexi Murdoch, Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams and on an on. I’m really a swingin’ hep cat in private). Point is I’m not into the stuff that’s currently popular. This means I don’t wear a sideways baseball cap and tune into the  local rap station and turn up the bass and roll my windows down at red lights to pump out a little Wiz Khalifa.  See the Grammys kind of recognize pop culture as it’s happening at that particular moment. Zen-like they are. They just happen to generally miss the big picture until it’s way too late. All you have to know about this self-congratulatory awards show is that The Who, Led Zeppelin, Diana Ross, The Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix and numerous other musical mammoths never won a Grammy. Kanye West (who?) has won 14.  Also there’s a guy up for new artist this year named Skrillex. I dare you to look him up on YouTube and see if you can actually sit through an entire “song.” I couldn’t.  Unlistenable garbage. Pass. As Jim Morrison of The Doors (who also never won a Grammy) once said, “when the music’s over, turn out the lights.”

Oh and speaking of artsy fartsy stuff, this weekend I finally awakened and realized that I have a Wii game system that was left in the God View basement by the boys when they cleared out after Christmas. The importance of this discovery is that La Sooze and I pay a monthly fee for NetFlix, a terrific little service that let’s you watch movies instantaneously but only if you happen to have a game system like Wii hooked up to your tube. Now I do. So last night, since we’re middle aged and middle class, we figured we’d check out the Wii and The Netflix and find a movie to watch since we were not previously engaged since we’re pretty boring people. So we ginned up the Wii and started looking for a movie and  I swear an hour later we were still looking and discussing. The problem these days is that there are just too many movies to choose from and most of them sound like they suck. That said we do have a very good movie choosing editing system that we find quite useful. We read the accounts of any movie that seems even moderately watchable and then we knock them out when key words and phrases appear early in the description –  “A CIA operative…”  gone. “In an alternate universe…” next. “A murder occurs…” buh bye now. “Aliens…” moving on, “Martial arts specialist….”sayonara.  See this helps. Reduces the kvetching over what to watch. What doesn’t help is that knocking out murder, intrigue, ghouls, international (or domestic) espionage and slow motion kick-boxing pretty much eliminates 95 percent of all movies made in the last decade. What you’re left with pretty much is indy stuff which is like wisecracking smart ass movies like Juno or uber devastatingly sad and intellectual films that make you want to hang yourself when you’re done watching them. We chose the latter. Of course we did.

After a meeting that lasted longer than the Yalta Conference and was twice as intense, we finally settled last night on a movie called “Lourdes,” which has nothing to do with Madonna’s (nine Grammys and counting) daughter, but instead is about a wheelchair-bound woman with MS who goes on a pilgrimage to the shrine at Lourdes, France and is miraculously cured. Wasn’t quite that simple, of course. There was a ton of subtlety and sub-text about blind faith and who warrants miracles and the forms that religious beliefs take. If God isn’t in charge, a woman near the end of the movie says, then who is? Not me.  Interesting and terribly depressing and thought provoking and agonizingly slow. Perfect. No murders, no cars blew up, no spies, and no one lost their identity. The problem with the movie, of course was that it’s French and of course that means the dreaded subtitles and whoever was in charge of the subtitles for this particular movie should have had all their limbs broken so that they should have to go Lourdes for healing. These subtitles, first of all were in white. Bad choice. Secondly there were so damn small that La Sooze offered to go sit on the end of the bed and  read them aloud for us. Thirdly they were on the screen for like 2 seconds so if  you were not a small white type speed reader from 20 feet you were screwed. Suffice to say La Sooze and my conversation during the movie consisted of “what’d that say?”   or, “did you read that?” We probably missed about half the lines in the film but since it was French it didn’t really matter. We got the point.

Anyway after the movie was done La Sooze and I were so thoroughly despondent we decided to find another movie to cleanse our palettes. Very quickly we decided on a classic called “The Green Years” from 1946 with Hume Cronyn about an orphaned Irish kid who gets sent to Scotland and is raised by his great grandmother.  OK, not exactly a yuk a minute but at least I didn’t have to read the damn thing at the bottom of the screen and plus you know I love the oldie moldie movies. Much more in my wheelhouse than Lil’ Wayne. Of course early in the movie the grandfather, played ably by Charles Coburn, sings a drunken version of that Scottish classic  Wi‘ a hundred pipers, an’ a’, an’ a which describes the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Unfortunately, 200-plus years too late to draw the attention of the Grammy voters, but not a minute too late for me.  When that song wins a Grammy I’ll start watching the show. Until then, Oy with the rap, already. Thank G*d for Netflix. Thank G*d for channel changers. Thank G*d for Charles Coburn and bagpipes – an’ a’, an’ a.

Bully for me

In case you’re interested, here’s how my mind works. Tonight I was driving to the grocery store after a little workout at the gym. I was listening to the radio, specifically the New York Rangers hockey game on the radio. Ok, that’s one thing. The other is that last Friday La Sooze and I went to a movie, a foreign film (or what I like to refer to as a “Fern” film). The movie, at least on the marquee, was called “In a Better World,” but when I got home from the film I looked it up on the trusted all-knowing Internet because I am a freak for information and for knowing exactly what’s going on around me. I hate to just accept anything. Anyway turns out the film was Danish and is actually called (in Danish, natch) Hævnen, with the “a” and the “e” smooshed together as they do it in Daneland. Translated the movie title actually means “The Revenge.” I like that better than the name on the marquee, which sounds more like a eulogy.

So in this movie there’s a scene where this little kid is being bullied by a Danish goon at school and a friend of the kid’s decides to get revenge ( a little Hævnen, if you will), and he does so by beating the bully to a bloody pulp with a tire pump in the little boy’s room. Best scene in the movie. I was quietly cheering every blow. Beat his ass Hans.

So obviously that scene had an impact on me. So did tonight’s hockey game on the radio. (The Rangers won in overtime btw). Put the two together and where do I go? Straight to Andy Sloan and Perry Simone where I always go.
Stay with me on this one.

See Andy was a high school jock when I happened to be in high school. He was specifically a hockey and football player and pretty good at both if I remember correctly. He was also built like a basement refrigerator. Low, squat, wide and immoveable. He was also a prick, as most high school jocks were and still are. Glory days. So when I was a kid I loooved hockey. Started playing it on ponds in Rhode Island after my family moved there from the Bronx. I think now in reflection that I liked it because it was something to do that got me out of the house and away from my mother and also helped me make friends in a strange place. But I mistakenly translated that love for the game to the idea that I was pretty good at it. I wasn’t. After we moved again from Rhode island to Connecticut I played more pond hockey against some douchy neighborhood kids and that further strengthened my conviction that I could play but only because these kids were only a step away from being retarded. So by the time we moved again, this time to Ohio (ooof), I thought I was at least a distant cousin of Wayne Gretzky. So in Ohio I joined the high school hockey team even though by then I was a senior and didn’t know a soul on the team. Again, something to do. I did get to know Andy, though. He hated me. He was a talented jock-type and I was not and I was a senior and the coach, who happened to be Andy’s father, took pity on seniors and so I took playing time away from Andy’s other hockey jockey friends. Plus I didn’t even look like a hockey player. I had a terrific mullet and I smoked, even then. I was more a poet than a left wing. So one day in practice with my own team Andy Sloan went into full bully douche mode and was playing defense as I came down the ice and I wasn’t even carrying the puck and he checked me hard so I fell to my knees and then when I was in that terrifically vulnerable position he, skating backward, took his hockey stick in two hands and laid it in quite aggressive fashion directly across my face with a little oomph, right across my little Irish nose, which I now know is actually Jewish. What a great guy that Andy Sloan. Sure knew how to make a fella feel right at home. I’ve never forgiven him for it.

Which leads me to Perry Simone. Still with me here? It’s all about bullies. Perry was in Connecticut, before Ohio and before Andy Sloan did push-ups on my schnoz with a piece of lumber. Perry was a little skinny weasely Italian kid who was a sophomore at Immaculate Conception High School in Danbury, Connecticut when I was a freshman. One day I was rushing out of the school, which I hated, btw, to catch my bus and I pushed open a hallway door and accidentally shoved it into weasley Perry who was on the other side. I had never seen Perry Simone before in my young life. He snarled at me and told me to apologize to him. Like I say he was a little worm and i quickly sized him up and seeing not much there my reply to his request for an apology was the following: “go fuck yourself.” I then went on my merry way. I was not a particularly considerate person then; a little disenfranchised I’d say after too many moves and too many assholes and not enough love. I was also stupid. Turned out that Perry Simone was actually a mini-Godfather and his mob consisted of two gigantic tough guy goon friends that he employed to torture idiots like me. Who knew? Seriously, for much of the remainder of my freshman year at that awful Catholic high school I was regularly accosted in hallways and classrooms by Goon 1 and Goon 2 while Perry Simone sneered nearby like a rabid rat. Mostly this consisted of them grabbing me by the neck and pushing me into a corner and making obscene threats. Lotta fun. Most miserable few months of my life.

So the kicker to this story is that I had my shot to beat Perry Simone with a tire pump and I did not. That following summer after I’d been thrown out of Immaculate High School mainly because I didn’t fit in, I am riding my bike alone on a quiet street near our house and I swear to you, like a vision from above, who comes riding toward me all alone but the hated and evil Perry Simone. Again, he is alone. Goonless. I recall seeing him and briefly going through a wide range of emotions in a very short time that ran the gamut from fear to empathy to deciding whether or not I should knock his weasley ass off the bike and beat him bloody and leave him for the vultures. I did not choose the latter. I didn’t do anything if I recall correctly. I just let him go.

Anyway, back to the movie. The point of the Danish film Hævnen was that violence only begats more violence and ultimately doesn’t solve anything. Of course it was. It was a Danish movie for G*dsakes. The bike pump-wielding kid in the movie eventually sees the error of his pump-wielding ways and all is well. Cue the strings. I personally liked him better when he was whuppin’ the kid’s ass by the urinals. In fact even now, some 40 years after my own experiences with bullies, I would still like to get my own Hævnen. Not necessarily on Andy Sloan. He was just a stupid jock in a long line of stupid jocks and after all, I did suck at hockey. But Perry Simone, now that’s a different story. One of the true regrets I have in my life is that I didn’t stomp that little douche that summer day in Danbury, Connecticut. You only get so many chances in life to do something defining like that and I blew mine. Dammit. In a better world I would have forgiven ol’ Perry years ago and moved on with my life and the strings would play whenever I listened to a hockey game on the radio. But that’s just the movies where they make stuff up like kids getting revenge on bullies in a toilet. In real life you just let the douche bags go and then live to regret it. Some revenge.

Oh, and through the magic of the amazing Internet I found a picture tonight of the 1976 Centerville (Ohio) hockey team. That’s mullet-wearing me in the first row second from the right. I look like I suck. And that’s Animal Andy Sloan in the center with the captain’s C on his jersey and the black eye. I didn’t give it to him. I sure wish now I had.

I see said the crooked glasses man

It snowed tonight on the way home from work. Not much but it snowed. I guess it’s February, this is what’s supposed to happen here in the brown and holy east. But what’s really galling (don’t you love that word “galling? I do – sounds like something my nasty grandmother would say, drawing out the A for effect  – gaaaalling) is that Daughter Shannon texted me on the way home from work tonight as I was driving through the flakes and said that she and her BF The Duke, who is in My Hammy with her having driven the new Honda Fit down there, were going to watch the movie Tommy which was being shown at an outdoor theatre on the beach. Really?  I just checked the weather in Miami – it’s 73 degrees. You know what I did tonight while Shannon and The Duke were reclining on the white sands of the 305 and rocking to Roger Daltrey? I drove over to the local mall in the pouring snow and got my glasses fixed. Shannon wins.

Speaking of my glasses, here’s the REAL story. I have two pairs of glasses, one are like my everyday glasses that go with everything and pull many an outfit together. The other is more of a stylish pair, thick black plastic ones that look like the ones worn by the now late Joe Paterno or the still-alive with his legacy intact Martin Scorsese, the terrific New York filmmaker. I wear these when I’m feeling a little edgy. This is how pathetic getting old is – when I want to make a real statement I wear a different pair of glasses. What a wild rebel I am. Anyway recently I broke the thick black plastic glasses. Well I didn’t really break them, they kind of fell apart on their own. So I took them last weekend to the place where I bought them expecting they could be fixed. Here’s a shocker – couldn’t be fixed you’ll have to buy new frames and for you? $89.  But I like the glasses so I ponied up.  Oh, and the woman we’re dealing with at the glasses place looks like shit. She has that pale, drawn, red-nosed, achy look of a person who should be home wearing slippers and a ratty robe surrounded by wadded up tissues full of dried boogers. But she is not. She is selling me glasses. At one point I say to her “you look like you don’t feel well,” to which she replies in a snotty manner “I’m very ill.”  For some reason that cracked me up. Who says that? Who is “very ill” at work at a glasses store? Meanwhile I buy the glasses and the tools at the glasses store take out the lenses from the busted pair and put them in the new 89 shekel frames and then they give them to Miss Very Ill who does that thing where you put the glasses on and they look at you and decide whether they need adjusted or not. Fine. So I put them on and La Sooze, my personal glasses authority, is with me, and she takes a look at me and says to Sicky Face,  “they’re totally crooked,” to which Snotty Nose replies, “no they’re fine.” La Sooze looks again. “Look at his eyebrows,” she says, “one side’s way up, the other side is way down.” But no, disagrees Polly Plague,  “you can’t look at the eyebrows, that’s not how you do it. They’re fine” By this time I’m tired already of the glasses game so I take them from her sickly germ-infested hands and put them in my pocket and we pay and we leave.  So I get home and I decide to try the glasses on myself and look in the mirror, which I do. What I see is the face of a man wearing terribly crooked glasses. Looked like I had just crawled from the wreckage of a car accident or had recently been sacked by Osi Umenyiora of the Super Bowl-winning New York Football Giants. Worst part was that they were unwearable. I mean sometimes things aren’t quite right but you can tolerate it and then you forget about it. Not these glasses. I put them on and I felt like an instant nerd and my IQ dropped by 30 points. So I took them back tonight in the snow.  Typhoid Mary was not there, some other woman was. I put the glasses on again and she looked at my eyebrows and cringed. She fixed them nicely. I look damn good in them. I’m feeling edgy again. Think I’ll go as Marty Scorsese tomorrow to the office.

So I talked to Kev II tonight too. He was telling me that his college, Syracuse, had a basketball game this evening against their hated rival Georgetown.   Kev could not care any less about college basketball than he does about my dental hygiene. But he was mentioning it because he was going to make a little scratch tonight off the hoops rivalry. See Kev sometimes does work for this local record label up there at the ‘Cuse and the label had special t-shirts printed for tonight’s game and Kev was one of the guys who was going to be on the corners selling the tees. On commission, of course.  I told him to hold one back for me, thought it would be kind of cool until he texted me back and said “nah, you don’t want one of these.” Why, said I? Because, he said the shirt says “Fuck Georgetown” on it. Subtle. He’s right though. Not sure I’d get a lot of use out of it.

Oh and lately I’ve been trying to keep track of what songs on my iPod I will always listen to when they pop on. Like most red-blooded Americans I have an iPod that I adore and fill up with all kinds of music and I keep the thing on “shuffle” all the time which supposedly means that random songs will be picked out of my carefully selected music and played. What kills me is that when I listen to the iPod I spend more time skipping songs than listening to them. Recall these are all songs that I myself chose to put on the damn thing. So, I ask myself all the time, why do I have songs on my personal iPod that I don’t want to listen to? Good question.  Anyway I am trying to track which songs on the ol’ Podder I will listen to every single time they randomly pop on. So far I have like three. Steve Wynn and the Miracle Three’s “Amphetamine” is one of them. I don’t remember the other two. I think I skipped them.

Oh and speaking of music, I’ve been writing songs again lately only all the lyrics are angry. I keep telling people to go F themselves in different keys. I think it’s my new niche. Next up angry songs about winter, sick people and the shuffle function in iPod. Oh, and what rhymes with black plastic glasses?  Crack spastic asses, maybe. I kinda like that.

And here’s my hero Marty Scorsese – note the perfect alignment of eyebrow to black plastic glasses.

Angel Cody

 “He who does not see the angels and devils in the beauty and malice of life will be far removed from knowledge, and his spirit will be empty of affection.”


~ Kahlil Gibran

This is what I’m thinking about tonight: I’ve known angels. Real angels. I swear.

In fact one of them called me today. Angels apparently now use cell phones.

So this was now twenty plus years ago. At the time La Sooze and I were living in a little brown house in an old neighborhood in Baltimore City.  Our next-door neighbor was named Nana Paulina. She was a sweet little 90-year old Italian woman with a heavy accent and a Virgin Mother statue on her front lawn. She used to tell us that Sean as an infant looked like “the baby Jeez.”  It was that kind of neighborhood.

Anyway, that house is where I hit my bottom.  Maybe I’ve told you some of my story already.  I drank for years, long before we lived in the little brown house.  I drank in Ohio, in Kansas, in Baltimore. By the time we moved into the brown house, our first-ever house,  I was still drinking and Shannon had been born and Sean followed a year later. It was my dropping Sean as a three-day old in the basement of that house and knocking him unconscious that I knew that I could not go on. It was my final bottom that led me to make the phone call that would eventually lead me to the rehab where I would find the light of sobriety. Sad memories.

But back to my angel. Before I actually got sober I tried to get sober in different ways and in different places. I went through two five-day detoxes locked  in a ward in a hospital in the city. Neither worked. I went to outpatient therapy. Fail. I tried AA but more often than not I would tell La Sooze I was going to a meeting and instead would walk to the liquor store on Harford Road and buy a six-pack then sit hidden in the alley behind Nana Paulina’s house and drink it in an hour. Then I’d go home and tell la Sooze how much I’d learned.

There was one AA meeting that was close to the brown house in an old city church made of grey stone that I could walk to. The meeting was called “Courage to Change” and I would go sometimes, usually a little drunk. The meeting was in the basement of the church, a huge basement, and it was always jam packed with the most eclectic array of people I’d ever seen. Many of them were bikers, tough-looking guys in black leather, and hippies with long stringy hair and tough guys with dented cars in wife beaters and women in suede moccasin boots with fringes at the top.  Though I didn’t go there often I was attracted to the meeting.   The people there seemed so damn sincere. The most unlikely looking crew talking about High Powers and shortcomings and powerlessness.  Nothing phony there in that room. Nothing at all.

When I got out of the rehab in late October 1990 I went home to the brown house and was scared to death. I had been fired from my job and so was unemployed and La Sooze had gone to work to make our ends meet. So there I was, sober but fragile as fine china and responsible for two babies – Shannon and Sean. By that time I did not want to drink anymore. I wanted to somehow keep that little piece of light lit that I had found at the rehab. So I began going to AA meetings, this time sober and sincere. I would bring the children with me. Little Shannon would sit quietly in the chair beside me and I would bring a bottle of formula for Sean in my back pocket and just before the meeting started I would run it under hot water in the bathroom and feed him in my arms as the drunks told their stories and fed me too with their hope. During that time I found my first sponsor, a stiff old guy with white hair who looked like an angry Archie Bunker with white socks and black rubber-soled shoes. His name was Frank. Frank was a tough old drunk and meant well but he was mean. He was always telling me what I was doing wrong, telling me I would drink again if I didn’t change what I was doing. He scared me more than I already was. I had my hands full of babies and apprehension and infant sobriety. I didn’t need a prick, I needed an angel.

And I found one. I started going back to Courage to Change again with the hippies and the bikers and the toughies. There was a guy there named Cody who came to the meeting every week and he would speak in such an understated way, kind and gentle and after each meeting people would gather around him because he was sober and he had compassion written all through him and you just wanted to be near him and have his sobriety and humility rub off on you. I watched him from afar for a good long while and then one night I approached him and asked if he could be my sponsor. He said yes. I felt like I’d gotten the prettiest girl at school to be my prom date.

What you have to know about Cody is that on the surface he was one of the scariest people you’d ever want to meet. He wasn’t tall but wide, thick. He was a biker who rode a loud green chopper that he’d built himself out of spare parts. He had thinning brown hair that laid in thin ropes on his shoulders when it wasn’t in a ponytail and  his dark beard was dense and curly and reached all the way to the middle of his chest. It moved when he talked.

This was my angel. He wore a black leather cap and black leather chaps and heavy biker boots. Once he and I went to a Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee after a late AA meeting and the entire place stopped talking when he strode in and stared at him. Angels command attention.

I remember Cody telling me that I had to talk to him everyday and I did. I would call him in the mornings at his job. He was working in a restaurant as a cook and I could hear bacon sizzling on a grill while he calmly and with great care and love listened to my fears each day and instructed me like I was a child. A happy child.  I did this for months. He always picked up the phone.

Cody got me involved in things. He made me volunteer to be the person who ran the huge Courage to Change meeting and he took me on his travels bringing AA meetings to jails and halfway houses. After a short time together he confronted me about not having a job saying ‘you’re smart, you’re young, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be working somewhere. Just get a job, any job.” And I did. I delivered pizzas for a while just to get my confidence back, to have a reason to shower and shave, to be somewhere and have responsibility. It worked too. A month later I got a real job in public relations and have not looked back since. Cody was right.  Cody was right about a lot of things.

Sometimes people appear in your life and you do not know why but they are the right people at the right time with the right message. They are angels. Cody and I stayed in contact for a long time. He even stayed at our little brown house once for a while because I had gotten a promotion at a place 2 hours away and was staying away from home some nights and worried about La Sooze and the kids alone especially because a creep guy had moved into Nana Paulina’s house and was making eyes at Sooze. Cody rode his muscle bike into our driveway and parked it there and played with the kids outside where he could be seen. The creep never uttered another word.

In time, of course, we moved and I lost touch with Cody but have never forgotten him. Who forgets angels? I carry him with me like the chain I wear around my neck that was given to me the day I left the rehab. It reminds me that you cannot make miracles alone.

Today at work I was checking my phone messages and there was a voice on there that was familiar. The voice of my angel. “Kevin, it’s Cody,  how are you, brother?” I called him back. He’s still sober, still going to AA meetings. He told me about one of the guys I knew from Courage to Change that had gone back to drinking and bought a bar and then shot himself. Cody said there are always lessons yet to be learned.

And we talked awhile and I caught him up on where my life has gone since we last spoke. I  bragged about the kids and La Sooze and told him about my job and our beautiful God View house and my 21 years now without a drink. And I thought about how much of that I could trace back to him, the biker with the beard, the most unlikely angel I could have ever imagined.  I will be grateful forever that he was sent to me.

Here’s the Angel Cody in a picture I took at the brown house years ago. G*d bless him always.

Gratitude

Sometimes you go through these strange days or weeks when you are reminded of the sweet gratitude you should have for the gifts you’ve been given.  I bitch and moan sometimes, you know that, although every morning, well almost every morning, as I drive to work, I take a moment to whisper a little prayer of thanks for all the gifts that have been given to me – my terrific fam, our jobs, our house, our health. Thank you, thank you. I know we are immeasurably  blessed.

But lately reminders of these great gifts and blessings have been falling from the sky like fat drops from a hard rain. Recently Daughter Shannon visited a doctor in Miami for a routine check-up and they discovered a lump in her neck and sent her immediately for tests. Of course La Sooze and I had an immediate lump in our throats and were prepared to drop anything and everything to fly to Florida. But for the time being we just had to wait. Pray. Daughter Shannon called today and had spoken with the doctor. Seems it’s an issue with a lymph node that is not serious, not threatening. She is going back to the doctor later this week but she was assured it is nothing serious. Thank you, you, thank you. Gratitude.

Recently I also mentioned that my beloved uncle in Cali US had been admitted to the hospital. He picked up a nasty infection that had gone hard to work on him. Scary. These are not the kinds of calls and messages anyone wants to receive about the people you love. There are so few people in my life I would take a bullet for that I cannot bear the thought of any of them being anything but healthy and happy and flourishing. When they’re not I feel powerless. I don’t like feeling powerless.  I want to make them all well. US btw went home late last week from the hospital. He’s not jogging around the block just yet but he’s healing.  So too is my Aunt Marion in Connecticut who was in the hospital for 11 days with an infection too. Gratitude.

And then I’m riding home today on the subway which kept breaking down and annoying me because I had things to do tonight – to the gym for a quick workout and then to a basketball practice for my team and then it is garbage night so I have to put the cans out and on and on.  But what does all this matter, really? In the packed train car I get a text from my friend Mike. I mentioned him to you recently. He was diagnosed last month with prostate cancer. That ugly, ugly C-word. Last week he had surgery to remove his prostate and lymph nodes. He sent me a message just to check in with me from his bed at home. Can you imagine? I should have been checking in with him. He said he’s doing well, no pain, just chillin’. He’s out of work for six weeks and waiting for the results of tests. Always waiting. The hardest part.

Last week La Sooze and I got together with a dear friend of ours here at God View to do a little intervention with a young guy we know. This friend of ours has a son who has battled bad drug demons and now after some time in jail and rehabs and halfway houses he seems to have found the light. G*d bless him. His mom, of course, has seen so much, maybe too much from her own son. So last week she called and asked if we could talk to a friend of her son’s – a kid no older than Daughter Shannon.  He is battling needles and pills, has wrecked cars and overdosed on drugs in the past year. Last week he sat with us here in our living room. His mom was here and our friend and La Sooze and I.   We just talked. We did not have a plan of action for him, just expressions of love and a sharing of my own pain that led me once down sad paths too. I watched him as we spoke. He kept his eyes down, he petted the dog. He listened. You could taste his ache if you tried.

This is where I’ve been lately – worrying, thinking, waiting, standing on a crowded subway car tonight listening on my iPod as Ben Harper sang “I’ve come too far to give up or to be turned around, I will not be broken, I will not go down.”

I was thinking about that today, about the will to live, about the passing of our time, about the hearts that revolve around me that I care so deeply about. It is a small circle but solid. With me if you’re in you’re in. Real recognizes real. And I was thankful, really thankful like I am in the mornings driving to work starting new days like I am starting over again. Thankful that these people have been put in my life. They are gifts.  We are all broken and hurting sometimes. I cannot heal everything, though I would like to. But I can try.  And I can care. And I can be grateful that they are here to remind me of the gits that have been given to me. Gifts like them. Thank you. Thank you. May G*d heal and bless you all.